RSS Feeds and Where to Find Them
I have been consistently using an RSS feed reader for about a month (perhaps). During this time, I have been searching around the net for feeds to stuff in my reader and it led me to wonder, which familiar spaces have had this feature which I had never considered/used till now? The answer is, a lot! The list is in no particular order.
Personal Sites
The classic! Many folks on neocities have an RSS feed for their website updates aka a changelog. Feeds are usually found on the footer, sidebar(s), or links page with the word “RSS” or its symbol of a signal.
Dreamwidth
DW slaps the RSS/Atom feed buttons right on every journal’s page. It’s hard to miss unless the user themself removes that section from their journal layout. The template is https://USERNAME.dreamwidth.org/data/rss.
Tumblr
A surprising find! I learned Tumblr has native RSS feed for all blogs unless they opt out of indexing which is an option buried on each blog’s settings. Seeing how the site now serves ads, I understand why this feature isn’t advertised at all. It literally encourages people to not use the site.
The URL for Tumblr RSS feeds are quite simple. https://BLOGNAME.tumblr.com/rss (ex. https://ina11recs.tumblr.com/rss). I started gathering feeds when I wanted to stop checking the site but also continued receiving updates from certain mutuals. Unfortunately, these RSS feeds include reblogs by default so I don’t have that many feeds from personal blogs, more from themed sideblogs/event blogs.
Pillowfort
Pfio doesn’t offer native RSS feeds. To obtain the feed from an account, I use rssbridge. It has the option to hide reblogs and several ways to display images. Doesn’t work with Communities though.
Mastodon
A recent finding! Like Tumblr, Mastodon supports native RSS feeds. The template is https://MASTODON.INSTANCE/@USERNAME.rss (ex. https://sakurajima.moe/@arimamary.rss). Of course, the feed only shows public posts and includes content warnings. I grabbed the feeds of several Mastodon moots so I can keep seeing their posts without having to check my instance/Fedi client :). Catching up with toots can be such a time sucker, so it’s nice to get the most important toots in a quieter place. It also works with hashtags, https://MASTODON.INSTANCE/tags/TAGNAME such as https://sakurajima.moe/tags/MarySelfPromotes.
Tapas
Another job for rssbridge! The feed from the comic I’m reading has worked well. I get both the thumbnail associated with the chapter, the text inside said chapter and the comic pages themselves.
Bluesky
Like the Twitter of yore, Bluesky has native RSS feeds for all accounts with public visibility (eg. those that don’t require signing into the site to see posts of). A couple of Tumblr fandom mutuals are more active there so I grabbed their feeds for my reader even if I can’t interact with their posts.
AO3 Tags
Another fun find! AO3 natively supports RSS feeds for tags. How cool is that?! It’s right there below the title after clicking on any tag. It also works with all the filters AO3 offers. I have some feeds of my favorite ships written in English. I’m sure some really specific feeds can be made with this feature!
(Traditional) Blogs
Last but not least, just like personal sites, several blog hosts offer RSS feeds natively. Technically, Tumblr, Mastodon, and Bluesky fall into this category but all three have prominent social features so I wanted to write about them separately. Blog hosts like Wordpress, Pika, Bearblog, and mataroa offer RSS feeds as far as I know. Even self-hosted options (like my zonelots blog) can have them.
I hope this post gave you some ideas to look for RSS feeds. rssbridge has so many places to extract feeds apart from the ones I mentioned. Highly recommend checking it out. Thanks for reading!